Music
Au Ras Au Ras, Au Ras Au Ras (Independent)
Tess Brunet’s debut album under the Au Ras Au Ras moniker is a feat of quiet determination. The phrase “au ras au ras” is Cajun French for “equal footing” and […]
Dickie Landry, Fifteen Saxophones (Unseen Worlds Records)
Sax player Dickie Landry left south Louisiana in 1969 to push music farther than he could back home as a member of the horn section for the Swing Kings. A […]
The Help, Keep the Beat (Independent)
What much of 1980s nostalgia fails to acknowledge is that there was more to new wave than funny clothes and synthesizers. New wave was, in ways, a means of creating […]
Blister in Le Soleil: The Lost Bayou Ramblers and Gordon Gano
I still wasn’t convinced Gordon Gano, singer of my favorite band of my youth, Violent Femmes, was really going to play with my favorite Cajun group, Lost Bayou Ramblers, until […]
Best of the Beat Music Business Award: Johnny Palazzotto
“My instructions were to go to the airport to pick him up, and whatever Son House told me to do, I did. The first thing we did was he said […]
The Ozzy Osbourne T-Shirt
In shop-class on the first day of junior high, the guy across the worktable lifted his head from his folded hands and declared to me, to himself or maybe to […]
Rough Seven, Give Up Your Dreams (Upper Ninth Records)
In a live setting, former Morning 40 Federation member Ryan Scully’s new band Rough Seven is a ball-peen hammer, raging blows from ragged craftsmen shaking the studs in your walls, […]
The Help: Help Wanted
Dig into the recesses of your New Orleans concert-going history back to the early 1980s, or, if yours is of insufficient vintage, jump onto YouTube and look up new wave band […]
Brother Tyrone: Jazz Fest Focus
Brother Tyrone is a soul singer. Not neo-soul, not a retro muddled Stax/Motown Frankenstein or anything like that. Soul. Always has been. Born in New Orleans in 1957, Tyrone Anthony […]
Robert “1-String” Gibson: Jazz Fest Focus
A common complaint among authenticity seekers roaming the crossroads of the blues is that the music is too sanitized, too cleaned up. Not wild enough. This complaint will likely not […]
